Memento
by MasterShaper
Summary: Ever heard the saying 'the world is not a book? Well, if the world of pokemon training was a book, it'd definitely qualify as a horror novel. AU. DISCONTINUED.
1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

This story is a crossover, and that much is true. However, it is not a conventional crossover, in the sense that it was derived from two incredible pieces of fanfiction within the same fandom. Maybe, just maybe, we might see another fandom being worked into the mix later, but there's no promises on that.

Digital_Skitty's 'Pedestal'.

Crukix's 'Regret'.

I'm going to be a little honest here – I actually considered myself retired before I read Pedestal. All I had here was a sci-fi story for FFVII (it WILL be updated, Myshu, don't hit me...), which I was going to complete before pulling a vanishing act on FFN.

One day, I ended up back here somewhere near two in the morning, after some revision for that horrible, horrible paper – biochemistry's a bitch, it is. And by random chance, I searched for an OT story. I clicked in the first title to turn up, and well... I'm here now, aren't I?

Let me just make the disclaimer that none of the characters, etc. used in this story belong to me, save for the original characters (of which there will be a decent number). So you'll probably be seeing bits and pieces of the Pedestalverse and the Regretverse floating around in here eventually. Some of them may also be from one of my other stories, though I'm still undecided on who's to appear here (also attributable to Skitty – a pokemon crossover called 'Complex').

And now, without further ado, MasterShaper would like to present you with 'Memento'.

Strap yourselves in and get ready for the ride – hell knows I'm going to do my damned best to make it unique, and I do hope you'll enjoy the show.

**Prologue**

If there were two classes I always did enjoy, they would have been Training History and Training Basics. While I couldn't have been called a bright student by most definitions and remember gladly spending my mornings snoozing away in maths class, Training History saw me ranking among the top three in the class.

Training Basics, however, saw me consistently being at the top of class. So you'd probably understand what I mean when I say that I was – and still am - a pokemon freak. Those disgusting numbers and equations never stood a chance in comparison.

Like most other ten year-olds, I dreamed of the day when I would finally finish with school and receive my training license. The government had written a few new laws making it harder to get one, but the tests probably weren't that difficult, judging by the passing rate.

What did make me a little curious back then was the fact that no one seemed to ever _remember_ what they were tested on, though. It was almost as if their memories of the testing had been blurred or otherwise completely forgotten.

But seriously, would you expect someone who just barely made it past their first decade to worry about such things?

Looking back, I realize just how naive I had been. Not just about the testing, but also regarding training itself.

Pokemon training was brutal. There, I said it. If there was one thing I learned rather quickly after starting my own training journey, it was that training definitely wasn't as sterile, predictable, and easy as the textbooks made it out to be.

Death, pain, shattered delusions, broken pedestals, and more pain. All part and parcel of being a trainer.

You might think that I was delirious when I said those things about training. Well, I wasn't – it was every bit as dark as I made it out to be. And yet, I wouldn't have given it up for anything in the world.

Emphasis on 'wouldn't'.

Why the doubt, you may ask? Well, that's all quite simple, really.

All you need to do is consider that life - even a trainer's - is nothing quite as scary as living with a bounty on your head.

xxx

The rain was coming down in sheets. Not droplets anymore, but sheets of water that came down to the earth with relentless force. Gutters were rendered invisible beneath several inches of water, and cars with stalled engines remained motionless on flooded streets. Occasionally, some surprisingly strong winds would blow this way or that, making the rain look like so many lace curtains billowing without windows to call their own.

Nobody in their right mind would be out during such a storm, and the streets were indeed empty.

Guess that classifies the three of us as lunatics, since we were running as fast as we could down one of those flooded streets.

As you might have guessed, running in several inches of water is never something advisable. Ian certainly got that knocked into his head when he slipped and fell face-first into the rushing rainwater.

"Get the fuck up and move!" Lucy shrieked as she almost tripped over him, her voice brely audible through the pouring rain. "Move it!"

He scrambled back to his feet, nearly falling back down a couple of times. "Shut it, Luce! You think I want to die?"

She didn't bother replying, instead grabbing him by the neck of his shirt and picking up her pace again. He stumbled a bit at first, but brought himself back up to speed and freed his collar from her grip. The two of them seemed about ready to kill each other, but somehow they managed to keep going.

Good for them.

We rounded a corner and found ourselves on a road heading to the edge of town. Up ahead, Mount Coronet towered over the forest that surrounded the sleepy hollow called Solaceon, its imposing mass visible even through the driving rain.

"Come on, you two!" I shouted back at them, barely able to hear my own words. "Just a bit further!"

Lucy and Ian, who had been facing the way were heading, saw him first. She let out a shocked gasp, and Ian tripped over his own feet in his haste to turn around. Only when I turned back did I see him, and it was all I could do to avoid falling over like Ian had.

There he was, standing in the rain, hands in his coat's pockets as they usually were. None of his pokemon were in our sights, but that didn't mean that they weren't within _range_ – we'd learned that the hard way back in Celestic. Hell, the fact that he was there ahead of us meant that at least one of them was already out and about.

When the rain began to let up a little, it became clear that he had at least two pokemon out of their pokeballs already. How lovely.

"Shit!" Lucy cursed, even as the three of us began stepping backwards, slowly. "He's alone, do you think-"

"No way, Luce," I hissed, swatting her hand as she tried to unclip a pokeball from her belt. "Do you remember what he did to Gloria?"

Ian kept his eyes on our... friend. "He's coming closer, guys, and he's got company."

Lucy and I turned to take a look, and saw that Ian was right – our buddy in the trench coat was slowly walking towards us. A glowing red light was floating in the air next to him like a creepy, moving beacon, while something large and close to the ground was following him slowly.

"Head for the ruins," Ian said, just loud enough for the two of us to hear him. "Split up near the daycare, and head for the woods."

"Are you crazy?" Lucy snapped. "We could get lost in there, or worse!"

"Remember the clearing?" he said, somehow managing to sound calm. "We'll meet up there."

I nudged her in the side, and nodded. "Just do what he says. Better to die in the woods than... you know."

She looked downright furious for a moment, but that was it. "Alright, on three?"

"Three," Ian and I said in unison.

With that, we ran back the way we had come, causing the man in the trench coat to yell at our retreating backs. The rainstorm began to pick up on its intensity again, even as the ground shook beneath our feet. Rainwater sloshed about in the wake of the tremors, but still we managed to avoid falling over.

As we ran for the Solaceon ruins, the rain abruptly stopped.


	2. Examinations

**Chapter 1 – Examinations**

_Two years earlier_

The battered old alarm clock on my bedside table rang as it always did, but when I stretched my hand out to stop the alarm, my hand passed through thin air. Slowly getting up and trying to glare at the offending machine through my sleep-clouded eyes, I saw that it somehow had been moved to the floor next to my room's door.

It must have been my mother's work – she always moved my alarm clock beyond arm's reach when she wanted to wake me up.

Letting out my customary sigh upon being awakened, I hauled myself out of bed, and went over to shut the alarm off. Picking up the much-abused timepiece, I headed back over to my bedside and placed it back in its usual spot on my bedside table. Ten seconds later, and my bed was made. It was just my usual morning routine, really.

Except that this morning wasn't the same as any other morning, really.

Why, you might ask? Well, it was simply because my alarm clock had rang at six, and within two hours, I'd be registering for the exams that would determine if I was fit to receive a pokemon training license.

With those thoughts running through my mind, I yanked my room door open, and headed down to the kitchen.

xxx

My mother was nowhere in sight when I made it to the kitchen, so I decided to get ahead of her for once and get breakfast started. Five seconds saw the frying pan finding its place on the stove, and four eggs getting cracked into a bowl before getting the crap beaten out of them. Hell, eggs were probably among the easiest things to cook in the morning, and they tasted good, so they seemed like a good idea.

"Someone's up early today," said my mother as she walked into the kitchen, holding the newspaper in her hand. "

"Well, someone else was up earlier," I replied with a smirk. "Otherwise, my alarm clock wouldn't have moved to the door again."

She said nothing but moved over to the kitchen table and took a seat instead. Pursing her lips slightly, she began to read the headlines. Even as I fried up the scrambled eggs, I watched her out of the corner of my eye.

Yup, it was that expression all right.

Shaking my head to clear my thoughts a little, I scooped the scrambled eggs out onto two plates, and brought them over to the table. Before she could even look up from the news of the world, I returned to the stove, and swapped the frying pan out for the kettle.

"So," she said, making me nearly jump out of my skin, "today's the big day, isn't it?"

I didn't really know what to say and so I settled for a nod as I took out our tin of coffee and spooned some into two mugs. Her voice was hovering somewhere between resignation and anger, and so I decided that maybe non-verbal responses would be the safest.

"It's going to be real quiet around here once you're gone."

I shrugged, frowning slightly to myself as I did so. "I guess so."

For a short while, there was silence in the kitchen as the water in the kettle began to boil, and I switched the stove off. However, she broke the silence soon enough.

"There once was a time when all the kids left home when they turned ten. I can even remember them talking about it on the evening news after you were born."

Hot water was poured out of the kettle and into the two mugs, causing the kitchen to be filled with the aroma of coffee within seconds. Without saying a word, I brought them over to the table, and sat down opposite my mother. She accepted one of the mugs with a soft murmuring of thanks, and stared down at its black contents.

The coffee in both mugs was black and without sugar. At least the two of us agreed on how we liked our coffee, this morning.

"It isn't too late to pull out, you know," she said softly, even as she sipped from the still-steaming coffee. "You don't have to do this."

"I'm doing it, all right," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "We've talked about this before."

"But-"

"You were _ten_ when you started your training journey, Mom," I reminded her, raising an eyebrow as I sipped from my own mug of coffee.

She slammed her mug down onto the table, causing coffee to splash out of it. I suppressed a wince upon seeing her furious expression, and braced myself for the words which I knew she was going to say.

"When _I _was ten, the world was different. There were only eight gym leaders, and Cynthia wasn't even a League contender yet," she snarled. "And of course, Nicholas Sayre wasn't even born yet."

"You're not winning me over with that argument, Mom," I deadpanned, trying not to flinch as she gave me one of her best glares – intimidating, but definitely not her best to date. "I'm going for the testing today."

"It's no longer safe out there," she hissed. "Look what Sayre's followers did to your father!"

All I could do was look her in the eye and try to return the glare. "And why do you think they increased the minimum age for training from ten to thirteen? And increased the number of gyms? Oh, and they even built GPS trackers into the new Pokedexes."

My mother managed to hold on to her glare for about five more seconds, before her expression softened into one of defeat. "Looks like there'll be no persuading you to change your mind, then."

I nodded stiffly, gripping my mug of coffee so tightly that my knuckles had turned white. Somehow, I didn't feel the heat from the mug, and the mug was surprisingly still despite my nervousness.

"Get changed, then," she said softly. "You can't be heading for the tests in just your shorts now, can you?"

"Duly noted."

xxx

As I finished washing the breakfast dishes, I glanced at the kitchen clock, and saw that it read a quarter to seven. Hanging the dishcloth up to dry, I strode out of the kitchen, and saw my mother sitting down at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she was holding a small, framed photograph in her hands.

I didn't even have to get closer to her to know that it was a picture of my late father.

"You do your best today, alright?" she said, her voice quavering. "Make him proud."

She probably didn't expect me to go over to her and sit down beside her, if her face was anything to go by. "I will. You take care over here, okay?"

"I'll get along," she sighed, leaning on my shoulder. "Look at this – you're all grown up now, and I'm a wreck because of it."

"Mom-"

"Don't you ever give up," she said forcefully, cutting me off. "He would have wanted to see you succeed, so you'd better not give up. Promise me you'll never give up."

I sighed, and wrapped my arms around her. "I promise, Mom."

We sat there for what felt like ages, until the clock in the hall struck seven. The little mechanical pidgey in it sprang out and began chirping, snapping me out of my reverie.

Slowly, I let her go, and got up. "I'm going now, Mom."

Wordlessly, she nodded.

With that, I made my way to the front door, and picked up my backpack from its place next to the door. I opened the door, and turned around to make sure my mother was alright. Sitting there at the foot of the stairs, she looked all too much like the miserable widow she'd been for the first year after my father had died.

"Go," she said, simply. It sounded like a plea as much as it sounded like an order.

I walked out of the house, and shut the door behind me.

xxx

The licensing examinations were held simultaneously all over Sinnoh, without adjustments for the different time zones. So basically that meant that some of the more unfortunate exam candidates – usually from Canalave or Sunyshore – would have to start going for their tests in the middle of the night, but the government really wasn't too fussed about it. However, Jubilife was located within three hours of Sinnoh Central Time, and so my paper was slotted to start at eleven in the morning.

Really, the government seemed to be quite serious about ensuring that the questions for the exam didn't get leaked out.

Of all the places the government had chosen to hold the written parts of the exam in, they had chosen the Jubilife Elementary School. While undoubtedly spacious enough, the school was also rather old, and so they'd had to jury-rig all their surveillance and monitoring equipment on the spot.

I walked past bundles of cables on the ground and temporary barriers that had been erected near the school, flashing my identification card to get past the security guards posted there. Several pokemon patrolled the area also, though I only managed to see a group of mightyena and a mean-looking croconaw.

When I finally reached the registration desk in front of the elementary school's office, I saw that it was manned by a rather strict-looking woman and a kadabra. There was already a queue at the desk despite the fact that it was only about half past seven, and so all I could do was to join the line. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before I made it to the desk, and was given a form to sign.

"Fill in this form, please," the woman behind the desk said, as her kadabra gave me the evil eye. "And once you're done, you can tear off the first page and take it to the classroom over there."

"Which classroom, you say?" I asked, as I filled in my details on the form.

"The one with the bronzong hovering outside it," she replied, sounding bored. "Done? Good – next!"

With that, I tore off the first page of the form as instructed, and walked towards the only classroom which had a bronzong in front of it. Nodding to the psychic pokemon as I passed it, I entered the classroom, and saw that several others were already seated in there, at specific desks.

A man was seated behind the teacher's desk. "And what's your registration number, kid?"

"Twenty one," I answered. "Zero-two-one."

"That desk, right over there," he said, gesturing to a desk in the corner, near the room's back door. "You may study any materials you've brought in, but don't make any noise."

I walked between the rows of desks, somehow feeling as though I was being watched. When I turned to look around, I saw that my fellow candidates were all intently poring over their own notes. However, the bronzong that had been hovering outside the classroom was now looking in through the doorway.

A shiver ran down my spine once I realized that the bell-like pokemon had been watching me through the two glowing spots that passed for eyes on its metallic body.

Deciding to ignore the creepy psychic, I hurried over to my assigned desk, and took my seat. Dumping my backpack on the ground, I unzipped it, and pulled out my trusty old notebook – six years' worth of pokemon-based education had been summarized in there, and I almost knew the whole thing by heart.

'Almost' being the operative word there; some of the more obscure pokemon type interactions it contained occasionally eluded my memory.

And so I began going through my notes again, for what felt like the hundredth time. And yet, a lingering doubt remained in my mind, that I had not worked hard enough. Shrugging it off and trying to ignore the knots my stomach was tying itself into, I forced myself to read, even as the clock counted out the last thirty minutes before the exam began.

In what felt like too short a time period, half an hour passed, and the invigilator stepped into the exam hall. He was a rather tall man in a suit, who wore sunglasses. Behind him was the bronzong that had been watching the classroom's entrance, along with the woman who ahd been manning the registration desk.

"Are all the candidates here?" he asked her, not even turning around as he did so. "This is the first classroom, correct?"

"Yes, sir," she nodded, as she handed him a sealed brown envelope. "All the question papers for this group are in this envelope, and the foolscap paper will be delivered once you've finished with the briefing."

He smiled upon hearing that. "Good, I like it when things are done by the book."

With that, he produced a letter-opener seemingly out of thin air, and proceeded to slit open the envelope. Pulling a sheaf of papers out of it, he stepped up to the teacher's desk, and fished a watch out of his pocket. He looked up at the class clock, and frowned.

"This thing's two minutes off, so we'll be starting with an abbreviated version of the briefing," he said. "I presume you all know what we do with cheaters?"

Several nods of assent were all that he got as a response. He didn't seem fussed by it, though, and started handing out the question papers. It seemed to be a tad thin for a question paper that supposedly was comprehensive enough to test the very limits of a potential trainer's knowledge, but then again, no one had ever remembered what it was like.

Two hours for one exam seemed reasonable, though.

When the foolscap was handed out and we were given permission to open up the questions, though, I finally understood why the question paper was so thin. My eyes grew wider and wider as I read through the questions, and you probably would've laughed if you had been there to see my face.

According to the instructions, the whole question paper was about pokemon types and their interactions. There wasn't a single question about edible or poisonous plants, nor were there any about elementary first aid. Apparently, the exam was to be conducted in parts, and this paper was merely the first of five parts.

Trying hard to not grind my teeth into stubs out of sheer frustration, I read the first question, and cursed mentally.

_Aside from the obvious type trump, why would a steel-type be at a disadvantage against an electric-type? Elaborate in detail._

Well, fuck! I'd just read through my notes on that very topic, and yet, my memory had decided to fail me on that particular topic. Attempting the next question, however, did little to improve my mood.

_Describe three methods of attacking a shedinja that do not utilize the five types which it is weak against._

Why, oh why did all these crap questions have to come out? Which motherfucker set these things? The probability of me encountering a shedinja in the wild was most likely minute, and yet these assholes had decided to set the question anyway.

I cursed again, and silently hoped that the people that had set the paper would suffer from some horribly annoying rashes in the near future, even as I moved on to the next question.

xxx

I staggered out of the classroom after spending nearly twelve hours in there, sitting for the four papers that comprised the written portion of the licensing exam. My fellow candidates all looked just as bushed as I did, and one of the other guys was holding his crotch with an expression of agony on his face – probably only the gods knew why he was doing that, and I had no intention of finding out the reason for him cupping his family jewels in an exam hall.

"Horrible papers, eh?" grumbled one of the others, as we headed down to the school's entrance for the ride that would take us to the fifth and last part of the testing. "They sure went crazy with the obscure questions, man."

"I think I failed," cried one of the girls, even as we made it through the school's gate and a bus pulled over in front of the school. "I left so many questions blank!"

"Nothing to do now but keep moving," said one of the other girls, so quietly that I nearly couldn't hear her. "One more test, and it's all over."

We filed into the bus, and saw that several others were already in there. They looked exhausted, and some were crying quietly.

Sweet Arceus – just what kind of testing was this supposed to be, anyway? And to think that we'd only finished the first day of it, too!

"Get in, get in," mumbled the bus driver, an elderly man in an oversized jacket. "'I've got six more newbies to pick up before we get to the testing area!"

All of us took our seats, and the bus rumbled off to wherever its next destination was. By then, our surroundings were already completely dark, and the digital clock above the driver's seat read a quarter past eleven.

The bus made its way to a small town about three miles out of Jubilife, and the six remaining candidates got on there. From there, it slipped off the main roads, and began traversing the winding roads that hadn't been used that much since the highways had been built. It almost felt eerie looking out of the windows, what with the road being completely darkened and all.

Some of the bus' passengers ended up snoozing, but I couldn't sleep at all. Just the thoughts of whatever we were about to go through were enough to keep me awake, and the mystery of it all only served to further fuel my adrenaline rush.

At around half-past midnight, the driver stopped the bus near the entrance to what resembled a small village – just visible at the furthest reaches of the bus' headlights – and picked up a microphone that was wired to the dashboard.

"We've arrived at our destination, kids," he said gruffly. "For what it's worth, good luck – you'll need it."

He moved the bus forward, and came to a stop right at the village's boundaries. From what I could see thanks to the headlights, the village was actually a cluster of buildings enclosed by a large chain-link fence with coils of barbed wire on top of it. Several glowing objects approached the fence, eventually becoming discernable as being military officers with torches in their hands.

I didn't miss the growlithe and hondour that followed them to the fence, either.

When they reached the fence, parts of it began to slide aside, until a gap wide enough to let the bus pass through had been opened. The bus crawled through the gap, with the officers shining their torches up at its windows to get a look inside it. Since the ground seemed to be sloping downwards a little past the gate, we all ended up being scrutinized by them as we entered the village's compound.

Finally, the bus stopped again, and the driver killed its engine.

"Everyone out," he said, speaking into his microphone once again. "Follow the officers, and all the best."

I felt a little discomfort as we got off the bus, and walked towards the waiting military men. That was the second time he'd wished us luck already, and he seemed to know a thing or two about what this part of the testing process entailed.

"Move it!" called one of the officers as we gathered before them. "Get your asses in line and dump your belongings on your right! Damn it, hurry up!"

We scrambled to form a line as he'd instructed us to, even as they started screaming and shouting at us. Their pokemon also gave them a hand at being as loud as they could be – the growlithe and houndour barked and menacingly snapped at our heels as we fearfully stood before their trainers, single file as ordered.

"You know, we really shouldn't be doing this to you guys," said one of the soldiers, his voice betraying a trace of amusement. "But none of you will remember this, anyway, so why shouldn't we have some fun, eh?"

"What do you mean by that?" asked one of guys, causing a deathly silence to come down over the entire group of soldiers.

"Which idiot said that?" snarled a soldier. "Which bloody fool said that?"

Obviously, none of us answered him.

"Answer the fucking question! Which limp-dick motherfucker said that?"

"Calm down, Sarge," said one of the other soldiers, trying to placate him. "They'll be having their fun soon enough."

"Damn good thing that they'll be doing that," snapped the same voice, albeit with a little less fury in it. "You little shits follow us, and don't wander off! Any trouble from you morons and I'll have you fed to the mightyena, got it?"

With that, we followed them towards a rather large, bunker-like building. A single, dim bulb illuminated the bunker's door, and a scizor was standing guard next to it. It watched us through red-lidded eyes as we approached, and moved to stand in front of the door as the soldiers got closer to it.

"This is the last of the western group," one of them said to the scizor. "They're clear for entry."

The mantid pokemon hissed and jabbed one of its powerful arms towards us, and narrowed its eyes.

"Well, I count twenty three of them, and the manifest says we're expecting twenty three more. Is that good enough for you?"

With a nod, the scizor stepped aside, allowing him to open the door. "Move your asses and get inside! We don't have all night!"

We hurried into the building, the scizor giving us dirty looks as we passed it. However, being one of the last to enter the building, I noticed that none of the soldiers had entered the building with us.

"Umm, guys? The soldiers aren't in here," I called out to the others, just as the lights went out.

There were shouts of panic and confusion, even as some of us rushed back to the – closed! – door and tried to open it.

Somehow, the door was locked.

"Let us out!"

"What the hell is this?"

"Save us!"

It was only then that I noticed that a peculiar smell was lingering in the room. As a matter of fact, it reminded me of flowers. When I took in several breaths of it to try and recall what it was, I realized that the others were also sniffing the air curiously.

"Sweet Scent?" one of the girls asked, sounding surprised. "Is there a pokemon in here?"

"It smells like lilies, you think?"

"Definitely lilies... wait, didn't we see this in the textbooks, or something?"

"Yes, it smells like lilies, and no, it's not Sweet Scent!" cried one of the guys, sounding genuinely frightened. "Everyone, hold your breath and get us out of here!"

"What is it?" I shouted, not even knowing who my words were directed at. Somehow, I was beginning to feel... at peace. As if there wasn't anything to worry about in the current situation.

"It's..." he said, his voice becoming softer. "It's... Sleep Powder..."

Only then did my mind make the connection between lilies and grass-type moves. But by then, it was too late.

I crashed to the ground as my legs gave way beneath me, half-asleep even before I'd hit the floor.


	3. Start

**Chapter 2 – Start**

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that the ceiling above me seemed surprisingly familiar. It only took a second, however, for me to realize that the ceiling was none other than my bedroom's ceiling. With a grunt, I propped myself up on my elbows, and gave my surroundings a cursory glance.

I was indeed in my bedroom, so it seemed. And judging from the light that was coming in through the open window, it was just about to turn light, maybe about seven in the morning.

Things felt... awkward to me. I frowned as I tried to recall just what I had been up to last night, but came up with nothing. It was almost as if my memories had been wiped, or something.

Only then did something else click into place. Whirling about in alarm, I saw that yes, my bedroom window was indeed open. I had seen it earlier, sure, but it being open hadn't quite connected in my mental circuitry right then.

Narrowing my eyes at the open window, I got out of bed, and headed over to it. I hadn't slept with the window open since before my father had died, and that was a good ten years ago. Heck, the window probably only got opened once every month or so, when I cleaned it at my mother's insistence.

When I looked around to see if anything else was amiss, I realized that I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

"Okay..." I hissed to no one, feeling even more confused than I had been initially. "This is getting seriously weird."

The window was open, and I had apparently gone to sleep in a full set of clothes. Given that I hadn't slept with the window open for a decent bit of time, and that my pyjamas usually consisted of nothing save for a pair of baggy shorts, something was definitely not right. And of course, I had no recollection of my whereabouts last night.

Deciding that I really had no choice but to head down and ask my mother about the strange happenings, I slowly moved towards my bedroom's door. When I caught sight of the door, though, I found myself staring at it like I had at the window.

While I slept with the window shut, my bedroom door was never closed at night. And yet, I had awoken to a scenario whereby everything was apparently reversed. My bedroom door was shut tight, and a breeze blowing gently into the room reminded me once again of my first clue that something was amiss.

Seriously, what the hell was going on?

Steeling myself in case of any bizarre incidents when I opened the door, I yanked it open, and looked out at the landing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary there, except maybe for that horrible painting of flowers which hung over the stairs. Well, it had hung there for at least five years, but I still found the damn thing to be appallingly hideous.

I padded softly across the landing to the stairs – feeling all the while as though I was being watched – and moved down them as stealthily as I could. Alas, not very stealthily, that is. I only realized that I had stepped on the step with the loose board a second after my foot came down on it, and I froze, half-expecting someone to jump out from the kitchen and shout 'BOO!' or something like that.

Somehow, the step didn't creak. I regarded it with a curious look, and cautiously brought my other foot down onto it. Mysteriously, it remained silent, despite the fact that it had creaked persistently since time immemorial.

Something was seriously wrong with the whole picture. And I wasn't just talking about that atrocious flower portrait over the stairs, too.

Finally, after what felt like an entire hour's worth of cheesy horror movie scenes – you know, the sort where the killer jumps out at the characters from behind a vase or some shit like that – I made it back to solid ground, and off the bewildering stairs.

"Mom? Are you there?" I called out, trying to see if she was already awake and in the kitchen, reading the newspaper as she usually did.

"In here," came her reply, causing me to let out an audible sigh of relief. "Come on and get your breakfast, you lazy worm!"

Yup, that was her, alright.

I walked into the kitchen, infinitely more relaxed than I'd been in my bedroom and on the stairs. My mother was at the stove, watching something in the frying pan, and the newspaper was on the kitchen table.

However, the _other_ things on the kitchen table made me stop right in my tracks.

There were pancakes on the table. And there were three plates of pancakes that had been stacked up like miniatures of the radio tower, to be exact. Instantly, I recalled what I had been up to last night, and felt a lump forming in my throat.

So, it looked like I had passed my licensing exam, then. And I would be leaving on my training journey on this strange yet momentous morning.

Mom hadn't made pancakes for breakfast in a long time. And she was probably the one who had opened my window and shut my door last night when I came home and crashed after the undoubtedly hectic testing.

I walked up to my mother, and looked over her shoulder. A single egg was frying in the pan, and its edges were already charring. Reaching past her, I shut the stove off, causing her to turn around and look at me.

To be more precise, she turned around and looked at my neck. Only then did I realize how small and frail she appeared – I had known that I was taller than her for about six months or so, but right then, it struck me that she just seemed... shrunken.

"You passed," she said simply, even as she turned back to the stove and scooped the fried egg out of the pan, depositing it onto a nearby plate. "You passed."

"Mom..." I didn't know what to say, and so I settled for steering her towards the kitchen table and making her take a seat, even while she was still holding the spatula. Really, what else could I do right then?

She looked downright depressed right then, and I felt a pang of remorse; my insistence on becoming a trainer was the cause of all this. Since Dad had been killed during the chaos started by Nicholas Sayre's followers ten years ago, the two of us had relied on each other to carry on.

Their marriage had been a shotgun marriage, if Mom had been speaking the truth when she got all sentimental sometime ago. Both of them had been from Ecruteak, and had eloped to Sinnoh while I was still a bun in her oven, or so the story went. So when he got killed during the chaos that came about after the nationwide insurgence by the followers, she had been left all alone with a son just short of being three years old.

Somehow, she'd stayed in Sinnoh, making ends meet as a teacher. When opportunity knocked, she'd taken the chance to get a degree and moved up the ladder to become a lecturer at a college just outside Jubilife. Her pride had caused her to stay in Sinnoh instead of heading back to her hometown in Johto to face her family, and so she had stayed despite the hardships she'd had to endure.

And now, I was abandoning her.

"Times have changed," she said softly, as I brought her fried egg over to her. "The world's become much more dangerous since the days when we fled from Johto."

I sat down opposite her, but didn't touch any of the food on the table. It just didn't feel right to eat anything while she was in such a state, knowing that I was the cause of it all.

"Just... be safe," she said, as she prodded her egg around on its plate. "Call me whenever you reach towns, and call me when you're going to leave them."

"I will," I nodded, feeling a fresh wave of guilt washing over me. "I'll take care of myself, Mom."

"I know you will," she sighed. "But the world's no longer as kind as it used to be. And even back then, it was a cruel place to live in."

I reached across the table, and took her hand in mine. "I'll be back every Christmas, I promise. Even if I have to hitch a ride back or save up for a train ticket, I'll make it back for Christmas every year I'm out there."

She smiled faintly, tears welling up in her eyes. "That would be perfect."

It was a long while before either of us got round to eating breakfast that morning.

xxx

Most trainers got their starters from the professor at a pokemon laboratory or from a marketplace back in the day, it seemed. However, since the military began working with the training government to whip the trainers into shape, ordinary pokemon centers began functioning as distribution points for starters after you passed your training exam. Trainers would also receive their training licenses from the centers, which probably explained the presence of two army officers outside them since the new system was put in place.

I walked up to the blissey behind the pokemon center's counter and tried to swallow my nervousness. "Umm, hi... where do they give out the starters?"

"Bliss!" the egg-like pokemon pointed towards a sign on the wall that indicated directions to the room where they assigned starters. "Blissey!"

"Oh," was all I could say in reply, since I was already giving myself a mental whacking upside the head for missing that sign – it _was_ quite big. "Thanks!"

The blissey beamed at me as I left the counter and headed in the direction indicated by the sign, and I caught sight of the door with a soldier smoking outside it.

So much for me not turning out to be a clueless twat on my first day, even before I got my starter – it probably took talent to be that blur a person, I think.

As I came within twenty feet of the room, the soldier spoke up without even looking up. "If you're not here for a starter, bugger off."

"I'm here for a starter," I said nervously. "I just passed my training exam yesterday."

"Any proof of that?" he asked me, looking up at me with a sharp glare. "We get lots of fakers here, we do."

"Umm, no?" I felt foolish all of a sudden – of course they'd ask for proof! "Wouldn't it be in the records?"

"Well, it would be. But you could be another one of those fuckers trying to waste my time," he grunted. "What's your name, kiddo?"

I told him my name, and not two seconds later, he had thrown the door open and bellowed my name into the room. The sudden noise nearly caused me to jump out of my skin, and the blissey behind the counter let out a furious squeal upon hearing the soldier's bellow. It half-vaulted, half-rolled over the counter and walked towards him, brandishing a syringe filled with some kind of clear fluid.

The soldier caught sight of the blissey once he shut the door and turned back to face me and his eyes went wide. "Holy shit, no!"

"Blissey!" snarled the blissey, looking positively demonic as it advanced on the shivering man, waving the syringe around all the while.

"Hey, it's not like those patients of yours can hear me..." the soldier said weakly, as he backed up against the door. "Give me a chance, would you?"

The blissey shook its head, looking eerily sadistic given its profession as a pokemon nurse. I could only watch in a sort of morbid fascination, rooted to the spot, as the egg pokemon advanced towards its unfortunate victim. However, just as it made it to him, the room's door opened, causing him to fall through the doorway.

With a furious cry, the blissey narrowly avoided falling over as it tried to stick him in the butt with the syringe, even as he was down on the floor. The hypodermic needle hit the doorframe and snapped, causing the blissey to angrily throw the useless syringe at the cowering soldier. It then stalked off back towards the counter, offering me a bright smile and patting me on my elbow as it passed me.

I was seriously on the verge on crapping in my pants when it did that.

"Oi, where's this kid you asked me to check out?" a lanky woman in a lab coat asked as she stepped over the fallen soldier and caught sight of me. "Don't tell me you nearly got jabbed in the bum again..."

"I swear, those fucking distilled water shots hurt like a bitch," grumbled the soldier as he got to his feet and tried to regain some of his dignity. "Gods know why they're that protective over their patients..."

"They're the second most protective after kangaskhan, you ignorant twit!" sniffed the woman, blinking slowly as she gave me a once-over. "You there – are you the trainer whose name he called out?"

Trainer. She had just called me a _trainer_. "Umm, yes."

"Well then come on in!" she huffed, shoving the soldier aside. "Move over, jarhead! I've got a trainer to process!"

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered, only to hastily back away as she said something about distilled water. "Move along!"

I walked into the room, and could only gawk at the sight that awaited me inside it.

Several shelves full of pokeballs lined the far end of the room, and a large computer terminal dominated the wall perpendicular to them. Opposite the computer terminal was what resembled a workbench, with several Pokedexes lying around on it in varying states of assembly – or disassembly, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

"So, you've passed training," chirped the woman, as she practically slammed the door in the soldier's face. "Good on you, kid – nearly half the candidates fail, you know?"

"Right," I replied, still too awed by the sights in the room to really process her words.

"Anyway, what I'll be doing is going through your psychological profile here, and then checking the results of your affinity test," she said, bouncing over to the computer terminal's keyboard. "Do you recall which pokemon they used on you for the affinity testing?"

I thought about it for a moment, and shook my head. "Not really, no. Heck, I don't remember anything from the testing at all!"

She shrugged. "It happens, kid. Affinity testing is harsh on the mind and body... alright, now we'll have to wait for the computer to pull your psychological profile and affinity records, so I'll set your Pokedex up."

I cast a curious look at her as she pranced over to the workbench with its array of Pokedex parts. "Umm, aren't those a little incomplete to be used?"

"Ah, these are all malfunctioning units, so I'm cannibalizing spare parts out of them!" she said happily. "Your Pokedex will be brand new, hon."

With a flourish, she fished a plastic-wrapped Pokedex out of a box under the table, and brandished it in my face. "See, all new!"

"Oh, wow..." I stared at the little red machine with starry eyes as she unwrapped its covering, and reached out for it. "Can I touch it?"

"Not yet," she murmured, as she grabbed a screwdriver off the workbench and began fiddling with the Pokedex. "I'll need to configure it to you and your training license first."

Just about then, the computer beeped, and she went over to it, Pokedex in hand. A hatch slid open at the base of the terminal, and she opened up the Pokedex's metal casing before pulling out what appeared to be a mass of circuits wrapped in metal bands. In went the stripped circuits, and the hatch slid shut.

The computer screen remained black for a moment, before lighting up with a picture of me and a whole block of text. A fuzzy image of a diglett appeared on the screen next to my profile, and the woman seemed confused by that.

"They tested you with a diglett?" she asked, sounding puzzled. "You have a ground affinity, then?"

"You're the professional," I reminded her, feeling even more clueless than I had initially been. "I'm just getting confused here."

"Eh?" she asked, still poring over the text box that she had brought up after seeing the picture of the diglett. "Yes, it seems you have a ground affinity. Based on the psychological profile we have, and the stock of ground-type starters..."

She hesitated for a moment. "Oh, my goodness. They're not going to like this..."

I went over to the terminal, but she shut the text box before I could read it. "What? What's so bad about my affinity?"

"It's not the affinity – we get a decent number of ground affinities..." she said, stepping back from the computer and tapping her chin thoughtfully. "It's just that from your profile, you seem to be perfectly matched with an unusual species of starter."

"What is it?"

"Ah, well," she sighed, "I'll just pass her to you, and we'll see how things go from there."

She tapped several more keys, and the screen went dark. The hatch containing the Pokedex's innards slid open again, and she withdrew it, slipping it back into the red metal casing with an ease that could only have been gained through practice. Then, she moved over to what resembled a large coffeemaker in the corner, and flipped several switches.

"Your starter pokemon is out at the Oreburgh pokemon center presently, so I'm bringing it over here," she said, as the machine's central glass tube began to glow. "She should be arriving in a minute or so."

I watched the machine, fascinated, as the glow began to intensify, and a vague, spherical shadow began taking shape inside it. For a brief moment, the glow flared up and brightened, before dying out completely.

As I blinked the spots out of my vision, I saw that a pokeball had materialized in the machine's glass tube. The tube slid open with a hiss, and the woman gently picked it up,

"Go on, she's yours," the woman said, offering me the pokeball with a smile that seemed a tad forced. "I've already programmed your Pokedex with your licensing details, so here it is."

I took the Pokedex with a nod, and slipped it into my pocket. Then, I gingerly reached out and accepted the pokeball from her, feeling its weight once it was nestled in my grip. It felt cold, and yet she had claimed my starter was a ground-type; goodness knows just what the little gadget held within its metallic confines. Maybe it was a swinub, since they were ground/ice dual-types?

Maximizing the ball by sliding my thumb over its release button, I activated the release mechanism, and bright light erupted out of the ball. It cascaded down onto the ground like a waterfall, and rapidly assumed the form of a squat, rounded pokemon.

When the light had faded away, I got a good look at my starter for the first time. It was a blue-skinned creature, with a red belly and little egg-like protrusions on the side of its head. It had several stripes that were a lighter shade of blue than the rest of its skin – on closer inspection the pokemon was clearly covered in scales as opposed to skin – and had a large fin sweeping back from its head.

Speaking of its head, the pokemon seemed to be all mouth. Two stubby arms and legs stuck out of its body, almost as if they had been placed there as afterthoughts, and an equally stubby tail stuck out behind it. Several sharp-looking teeth were visibly protruding out of its upper jaw, and it watched me with a curious expression as I knelt down next to it. What I had earlier thought was its belly turned out to be its chin, since it had no distinct neck at all.

Well, to say I was nervous when I did so would have been absolutely right. However, it was a small creature, and I figured I could trust it. "Hello there."

With a terrified squeak, it tried to run, and ended up stumbling over its own stubby legs. It crashed to the ground, and looked up at me fearfully.

"Oh, dear," I fretted, as I tried to get closer to it, and held out my hand to it. "See, it's safe. No danger here- OW!"

It might have been nervous, but it sure knew how to chomp down. With one bite, my left hand was stuck in its mouth, and blood ran down my wrist.

"Oh, goodness!" the woman cried, as she whipped out what looked like a pistol from her pocket. "Hold her still!"

"Don't shoot it!" I snarled, even as I shook the creature about, trying to make it dislodge its grip on my hand – fuck, it was heavy. Only then did the woman's words hit home with me. "Hang on right there, did you say it's a female?"

"Only for the tenth time or so," she sniffed. "This is just a mild sedative, kid. It won't hurt her."

"I won't have any sedatives to use on her out there," I hissed through gritted teeth. "Give us a moment, will you?"

"Alright, then..." the woman said, sounding unsure. "You'll need a tetanus shot after this, though. And we'll get that arm of yours bandaged."

"Whatever," I nodded, while turning to look back at my starter. "Alright, we're in a right pickle here, aren't we?"

She stared at me with big growlithe's eyes, trying to look pitiful, and made a rumbling sound that might have made some sense if one, I understood pokemon speech, and two, didn't have my hand stuck down her throat.

"I know you buggers can easily bite through metal, so you weren't trying to maim me, were you?" I asked her, as the pain in my forearm phased out into a dull throbbing sensation. "So why don't you let my hand go, and we'll have a bite together?"

With a muffled hiss, she bit down a little harder on my hand, and I winced out of pain. "No deal if you keep this shit up, though."

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman in the lab coat slowly drawing a bead on my starter with that sedative gun of hers. Reflexively, I rolled on the ground – still with my bleeding hand stuck in my starter's mouth – and threw myself between the gun and the pokemon.

With a popping sound, the gun fired a dart that hit my upper back. I fell forward due to the sudden pain, and nearly squashed my poor, frightened starter pokemon as I did so. She let out a terrified squeak, and finally dislodged her jaws, releasing my poor, abused hand from her grip.

"Oh, fuck," I groaned, even as the sedative began to take effect and the world started spinning around me. "Hopefully... that shit... isn't toxic."

I crashed to the ground as everything went black.


	4. Forest

**Chapter 3 – Forest**

"- you're very lucky that your gible didn't bite down harder. Their jaws are strong enough to break through concrete, you know," lectured the pokemon center nurse as she bandaged my injured hand. "Just what did you do to aggravate her, anyway?"

I rubbed the back of my head sheepishly with my uninjured hand. "Umm, well, I was trying to pet her. Offer her my hand as a sign of trust and all that?"

My gible sat on the floor nearby looking extremely guilty. Well, as guilty as it could be with those big eyes and pout, that is. And the thing was practically a walking mouth! Obviously, such a pokemon couldn't look that remorseful even if it tried.

"That was seriously a foolish thing to do, young man!" the nurse shook her head. "You see a pokemon with one of the biggest jaws for its size, and you offer it your hand? Tsk, I've heard of spinda with more common sense than that!"

"Well, it looked scared..." I mumbled, before the meaning of the nurse's earlier words finally sank in. "Wait, did you just say that it's a female?"

"Why of course!" she said, turning to point at the gible's head fin. "All female gible have a fin like that, and the males have a notch on the back of it. It's really the only way to differentiate between their genders until they evolve."

I looked at the gible's fin, and sure enough, it lacked any notches whatsoever. "So once she evolves I won't be able to tell her apart from other gabite?"

"Most probably," the nurse replied, as she finally secured the safety pin that would hold my bandage in place. "But dragons tend to retain scars even after evolving, so any battle experience she has would probably aid in making her distinct.

"Not that you should be deliberately putting her in harm's way, that is," she added, giving me a steely-eyed glare. "Is that clear, young man?"

"What?" I blinked like a noctowl at her. "You're not saying that I would... hurt her, are you?"

She sighed, and shook her head as she got up and packed up her stuff. "We get all sorts of people passing through the tests nowadays. The government claims the testing process weeds them out, but really, we don't think it's really as good as they make it out to be."

"I'll never hurt her," I said, noting that my gible was watching us intently, apparently listening in on our conversation. "Anyway, can I go now? I'd like to get started on my journey."

The nurse gave me a brief once-over, and nodded. "Alright, then - just remember to let that hand of yours air a little every now and then, and to get the dressing changed at the next town's pokemon center."

Getting up, I walked over to my gible, and took out its – I mean her – pokeball. "Alright, girl - do you want to go in a pokeball, or by walking?"

She gave me a curious look, and got to her stubby little feet. Walking forward slowly, she hesitantly nudged my foot, and looked up at me expectantly. When I raised my eyebrow at her out of curiosity, she nudged my foot again, and pointed to her own legs.

"You want to go about on foot, then?" I asked her, causing her to nod vigorously – it almost looked as if her entire body was rocking back and forth when she did that. "Okay then, but as soon as you try to make a break for it, you'll be back in your ball faster than a skittish jolteon, you got that?"

She let out a little sound that resembled a cough, and did her nodding thing again.

Just as I was about to leave the nursing station, I heard the voice of the woman in the pokemon-distribution room calling out to me. "Hey, kid!"

"Eh?" I turned to look at her, even as my gible let out a squeak and dove for cover behind my legs.

"I almost forgot to tell you this," the lady said, as she walked up to me, waving her sedative dart gun around absent-mindedly. "But you are aware that all pokemon that you catch will need to be registered using your pokedex, right?"

"They do?" I gave her a blank look. She definitely hadn't mentioned that to me.

She nodded. "Just aim the pokedex's antenna at them, and press the start button. It'll automatically scan them and register their species. Then, once you get to the next pokemon center, get them to insert a GPS chip under the pokemon's skin, and get any additional details filled into the pokedex. Got that?"

"Whoa... I think so," I said, as my gible let out another terrified squeak and actually began hugging my legs, trembling as she did so. "What's up with you, girl?"

"She's probably just scared of me," said the woman as she pocketed her dart gun. "White coat phobia or whatever, but I'll still be inserting that GPS chip under her scales before you leave."

I turned my head and looked down at the shivering gible, and sighed. "Do I need to hold her down or something?"

"It would be preferable, yes," replied the woman, as she took a syringe-like device out of her pocket and began tearing off its plastic wrapper. "And it's really quite a small chip, so it shouldn't sting that badly."

"What about the wound?" I asked her, right before my gible decided to try and run for her life. "Hey!"

Before I could even take a step towards the fleeing pokemon, there was a whistling sound, and a tiny, silvery dart seemed to sprout out of my gible's back. With a hiss of pain, she stumbled and fell, rolling like a ball for a bit before coming to a stop against a sofa in the waiting area.

When that happened, almost everyone in the room turned to stare at her, then at me.

"And what the hell are you people staring at?" snapped the woman as she slipped her dart gun back into her pocket. "Never seen a pokemon being tranquilized before? Mind your own fucking business!"

Aghast at her language – effective as it was in making all the bystanders get back to whatever it was they had been doing before my gible made a break for it – and wondering just which deity I had angered to merit receiving such a starter, I followed her to the snoozing pokemon, and watched as she prepared her little tracking device.

"Are you sure she'll be alright?" I asked, looking worriedly at the little dragon's slumbering form. "That looks like quite a heavy dose you gave her."

"Nah, she'll be fine," she said dismissively. "Now, just help me hold her in position... like that. Good, now... it's done!"

"Wow, that fast?" I squinted at my gible's back, trying to see the wound left by the syringe. "And there's no wound!"

"Reptilian pokemon tend to have muscles that reflexively contract to make their scales overlap over wounds," she shrugged. "Your gible will be coming back to consciousness in half an hour or so, I think..."

"Thanks a lot, miss," I said, as I picked the unconscious gible up and tried to carry it comfortably around its fins and limbs. "Which gym would you recommend for our first battle?"

She stopped to think for a bit. "Well, all twenty of the gyms are required to have pokemon that can battle for all levels of experience – that's why they scan your pokedex before battles. From there, they'll see which of the leader's pokemon are best matched to your experience level. So it probably won't make a difference which gym you start at, though.

"And I do suspect some of the shrewder gym leaders of using the scan as a means of sneaking a look at your team to gain an advantage in the battle. So it'll be best if you caught more pokemon and rotated your team, I think. That way, the leaders wouldn't be able to predict your battle tactics that easily."

I was stunned – the gym leaders cheated, if what she was saying was accurate! "They can seriously do that? Cheat using the scan, I mean."

"Oh, yes," she nodded. "There was a scandal sometime back with the leader of... I think it was Betwixt City. He was apparently using the scan to determine what pokemon his challenger had, and then using a team of disproportionate strength against them. Can't remember what happened to him, though."

"Well, shit!" I grunted, as I adjusted the sleeping gible in my arms – she was drooling as she slept, her little forked tongue lolling out of her mouth. "Any advice on which gyms I should avoid until I'm better, then?"

"Hmm..." she hesitated right at the door to the room that was her workplace. "Well, I suppose you could begin at Eterna and then head on to Oreburgh. Roark's been dealing with new trainers since well before... the revolution. And of course, Vaikuntha's always been kind to his challengers.

"You'd best be heading out soon, though; Eterna forest is nearly a day's walk from here, and it'll take you at least three days to make it through the forest."

"Alright, then," I nodded at her. "Thanks!"

But by then she'd already entered the room, shutting the door behind herself. The soldier guarding the room gave me a disinterested look, and I decided that it was time to go.

Or maybe I would have to wait for my gible to wake up. Nearly forgot about that minor detail.

xxx

"So, what should I name you?" I asked my gible, as I poked at our little campfire with a stick. "Can't be calling you 'girl' or 'gible' all the time now, can I?"

She looked at me and scratched the side of her head with a paw, seemingly mulling over the question. After a while, though, she apparently gave up and let out a little grunt.

"Hmm, you're a little dragon," I mused, as a bird of some sort let out a cry, causing her to jump. "What? Was it the bird?"

She squeaked and hurried over to bury her snout in my side, looking as if she was trying to hide from the night's darkness. The fact that we were camped just about a hundred feet away from the Valley Windworks building didn't seem to put her at ease, though. We had come across a small tree by the side of the path leading to Eterna forest, and had decided to camp out underneath it.

I sighed, and petted on her back – the poor thing was still shivering. "Look, I don't like having to stay out here either. But if we get an early start for our trek through Eterna Forest, we could probably get a travelling buddy."

A muffled squeak was all that I got as a reply.

"Well, I really ought to name you sometimes before we go to bed," I told her, shifting about and carrying her up onto my lap. "How does... Lin sound?"

She nibbled on her paws for a bit, before shaking her head – again looking as if she was doing a little jiggling dance of some sort.

"Oi, quit that!" I muttered, as her head fin slapped me in the face. "From now on, make one... hiss, sound, whatever for yes, and two for no. That work for you?"

She grunted once, causing me to let out a sigh of relief.

"So let's run through some names. Lilith?"

Two grunts.

"Hmm. Let me think for a bit," I frowned. It seemed that naming a pokemon was harder than I'd initially thought.

Dragons, dragons, dragons... Images of video games and comic books flashed through my mind, as I tried to think of a suitable name for my starter. Some of the more common names like Draco were horribly overused, and so I decided to keep them in mind only as some possible last resorts.

Plus, the gible was female. As much as I'd have loved to try naming her Smaug, I doubt she'd have found it amusing (even if Smaug _was_ a kickass dragon from JRR Tolkien's incredible imagination). But what the hell – I wouldn't know if I didn't try it out now, would I?

"How does Smaug sound?"

If looks could have killed, I'm sure that my starter would've murdered me right there using those big, shiny growlithe's eyes. Somehow, I was sure that she was feeling murderous right then as opposed to amused, despite how adorable she looked.

The two grunts merely confirmed it.

"Huh," was all I could say, as I resumed my poking at the fire, all the while trying to think of a name that the two of us would agree on.

I chanced a sideways glance at my starter, and saw her gingerly nibbling on a twig. From what I knew about carnivorous pokemon, those that could manipulate tools tended to do that after meals, to try and keep their teeth clean. Although admittedly, it was more due to the desire to not let scraps remain between their teeth rather than a fixation on oral hygiene which kept them at it.

In the firelight, she looked almost like a living cave painting or something like that – all shadows and blurred lines. For a moment, I was struck by how... at peace she looked. Gone was all the nervousness and timidity that I'd seen earlier, replaced by what seemed to be an air of contentment.

For the record, though, just where and how she'd managed to hunt down that starly, I didn't want to know. All I knew was that I'd been the one to slaughter it and cook it for the two of us. Smiling bemusedly to myself, I turned back to the fire, and froze on the spot.

There was a boy in the fire. Or at least, there was the image of a boy in the fire.

Not knowing what to do, I squinted to try and see his image more clearly. However, the more I tried to concentrate on him, the more the image seemed to blur.

All of a sudden, the fire seemed to flare up. Before I could do anything, the flames washed over me like a breaking wave, and I could barely even make any sounds as I was burned. The fire swirled around me like a living shroud, filling my lungs with its choking odour.

It took a few moments for me to notice that I wasn't actually on fire. In fact, the fire felt strangely comforting as it continued to burn around me – almost as if it was actually a sheet of lukewarm water. Looking back in my starter's direction, I saw that she was still picking her teeth for scraps.

Right in front of me, though, was the boy. And he wasn't alone.

I could somehow see his image in full color, despite the orange tint of the firelight. He was a little on the short side, and had brown hair. Next to him were two lumpy shapes that I presumed were boulders, but which were growing steadily more visible as the seconds passed. Behind him, in the distance, was what looked like the Valley Windworks building – but that couldn't have been it, since I was camped out a good hundred feet down the road from it!

As I tried to say something, anything, to the boy – who was looking more solid with each passing moment – but I seemed to have been rendered mute by his appearance. My mouth opened and closed like that of a beached goldeen, but no words left it. At last, the two shapes flanking him became clear enough for me to make out just what they were. And surprisingly enough, they were pokemon.

The mysterious boy had a shroomish and a numel by his side, of all things. He turned away from me, and seemed to be studying the building which resembled the Valley Windworks. The two pokemon accompanying him did the same, and for a brief moment, I got the impression that the three of them were... just tired.

With that, the swirling flames disappeared, plunging me into the dimness of my little campsite once again.

I looked around in bewilderment, trying to see if an abra or perhaps a mischievous ghost-type had been pulling pranks on me. When I felt a soft nudging against my side, I nearly jumped out of my skin, until I realized that it was none other than my starter. She had nuzzled up against me side, and already had her eyes closed. The twig which she had been using to pick her teeth clean was already stuck in the fire, and her rounded body seemed to be slowly undulating as she breathed.

Leaning against the tree behind me, I gently pushed my starter off me for a bit. Then, I took off my jacket and brought her a little closer to myself. She stirred a little in her sleep, but otherwise remained still. I draped the jacket over the two of us like a blanket, and slowly dozed off.

That night, my dreams were filled with dancing flames that had blurry faces in them.

xx

The night passed without any unusual incidents after the fiery hallucination, and so we headed towards Eterna forest after a quick breakfast of roasted starly that had been our dinner leftovers. It didn't take us longer than half an hour to get to the edge of Eterna forest, and so we settled down there to wait and see if anyone else was headed into it.

Hey, there might have been a cleared dirt track heading through the forest, but that didn't mean we were going to blunder head-first into the forest, alright? I'd overheard some pretty nasty rumors about the things that lived in there, and I was still pretty shaken up from the strange things I'd seen the night before.

On the upside, though, I'd found inspiration for what to possibly name my starter.

"How does Courtney sound?" I asked her, as I leaned against the sign which read 'Eterna forest' in faded black letters. "As your name, I mean."

She turned to regard me with a curious look, and let out a low growl.

"Is that a yes?"

Two grunts was what I got in reply.

"Hmm, then..." I frowned, realizing that I still had no reliable means of understanding her speech. "What is it? You want an explanation? Maybe change it a little?"

She sent one grunt my way. Finally, progress!

"You want me to change it, then?" I asked her, causing her to shake her entire body in response. "Alright, so you want an explanation...

"Well, I once watched this sitcom on television. There was this fierce lady in it named Miss Courtney, and so... yeah. Her staff and students called her an old dragon."

My gible made a huffing noise, and batted at my knee with one of her forelimbs. I looked down at her, feeling the beginnings of frustration. Seriously, naming her was harder and much more annoying than I'd anticipated it to be.

I looked her in the eye. "So, is Courtney fine with you?"

She rolled her eyes a little, and gave me a grunt as her answer.

"Finally!"

And that was how my gible ended up being named Courtney.

xxx

According to my watch the time was presently three in the afternoon. Courtney and I were staring hard at the path leading from the Valley Windworks to where we were, but not a single person had appeared since the morning.

"It took us nearly half a day to get here," I said to Courtney, "and we're the newbies! You'd think that someone would have come along by now, eh?"

She growled and clawed at the signpost a little, leaving several shallow scratches in the time-worn wood.

"You know what, Courtney? I'm starting to think that we should go in there on our own."

Courtney turned to look at me, and I didn't need to be an expert at pokemon speech to know what that expression meant. After all, 'are you crazy', 'have you lost your mind', and several other synonymous phrases tended to have a certain look associated with them, if you know what I mean.

I held up my hands. "Hey, we'll get some training done and stay near the edge for now, alright? Maybe later someone will turn up."

A growl was all she offered me.

"If we wait here any longer, we'd probably be old and gray before someone came along, I think."

She gave me a flat look, almost as if she was saying, "Oh, really?"

"Hmm, fine then," I huffed. "I'll tell you what – we go in there on our own, and by tonight, we catch you a partner."

Yup, her expression definitely looked as if she was questioning my sanity.

"So... what are we going to do now?" I said, feeling like an idiot. Here I was, having an argument of sorts with a pokemon that wasn't even tall enough to bite me in the balls if it got pissed when I was standing up.

Courtney started chewing on the signpost, something that I watched with a detached sense of amusement. Hey, no one was in sight, and I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to mistake this forest for some other patch of greenery. Everyone knew where Eterna forest was, after all.

Or at least, I thought so.

"Okay, girl, we need to compromise," I told her. "Otherwise, this is going nowhere. Agreed?"

She seemed to think it over for a moment – signpost still firmly between her jaws – and gave me a muffled growl.

"Hmm, I'll take that as a yes, then. We'll wait here for one more hour, and then we enter the forest, alright?"

For a moment, she seemed to smile, making me think that we had finally managed to come to an agreement.

Then the signpost finally snapped, and fell onto my foot.

xxx

"As long as we stay on the path, we'll be safe. Now shush, girl – there might be predators about."

Courtney let out a little hiss, and continued looking around as we made our way along the path that wound its way through Eterna forest. However, there wasn't just one path, but a multitude of them, all equally worn by usage and time. So we were basically winging it. She had been upset at first, until I pointed out that she had very nearly maimed my foot and and hand in the same day.

I did try to mark paths that we'd passed through, though. As we moved along, I used my penknife to carve two crosses and an arrow next to each other on the trees at intersections that we passed – the arrow would be pointed in the direction that we had gone. So far, we had only ended up retracing our steps once, and Courtnety had managed to dispatch several caterpie that had tried to harass us at one point.

Seriously, if I hadn't known better, you could have probably fooled me into thinking that she had been trained at some point in her past. The way with which she attacked the caterpie also left me wondering about how well she seemed to know the weak points of other pokemon.

It would have been scary if I hadn't been so happy with her battle skills, frankly.

"Now keep your eyes peeled for some low-leveled pokemon, Courtney," I said softly, as we continued along the pathway. "We could do with the additional eyes."

She grunted and continued looking around as we walked on, until the two of us saw something that stopped us in our tracks.

"Is that... is that a backpack?" I asked her, my voice barely more than a whisper. She let out a low grunt, and moved a little closer to me.

The backpack in question seemed to have been torn off its owner, by the looks of it. Its straps were shredded into ribbons, and a mass of soggy-looking stuff was sticking out of a large rip in its side, like the stuffing of a damaged sofa.

"Be alert," I whispered to her, as we passed the backpack. Around us, the sounds of the forest were still ongoing, which I took as a good sign – insects usually stopped singing when predatory creatures moved in for the kill.

With that sobering sight, we kept walking, heading deeper into the Eterna forest.

Through the thick canopy above us, the sky could be seen fading into twilight.


	5. Trekking

**Chapter 4 – Trekking**

If there was one thing I had to say about Eterna forest, it would have had to be that it was a natural maze. Even with my little markings on the tree trunks at every intersection, it didn't take long for the two of us to get hopelessly lost. And of course, by hopelessly lost, I meant that we'd somehow managed to lose the forest path completely.

Seriously, neither of us seemed to realize that we had wandered off the forest path. Fortunately, we hadn't yet reached the heart of the forest, if the canopy was any indication – we could still see the sky through it as we walked on.

And all the experts claimed that Eterna forest was basically a two-day hike at most. Based on that and my current experience, I really didn't want to imagine what the marshes of Pastoria or the icy slopes of Snowpoint would be like, at least not until I had gotten five badges and several more pokemon to work with.

"Really, you're acting as if this is entirely my fault. Aren't you supposed to have some, I don't know, innate tracking senses or something?" I grumbled, as Courtney continued to give me the cold shoulder.

She growled at me, and pointed upwards. When I looked up, I saw that the sky was already significantly darker than it had been when we'd entered the forest, and realized that it wouldn't be long before night set in.

"Well, shit! We need to find some shelter, Courtney, and fast," I muttered, looking around for a fallen tree, a stream, or anything that could possibly lead us to, or serve as, our shelter for the night.

Courtney then decided to attack my backpack's bottom.

"Hey, quit tugging on it!" I snapped, lifting it up and out of her reach. "What's the matter with you?"

She pointed at my bag, and mimed opening it up. With a growl, she gestured skywards again, and shook herself.

"Alright, then," I said, squatting down and opening up my backpack for her to take a look. "What is it?"

With a little grunt, she moved closer to it, and stuck one of her paws in, trying to grab something inside it. However, lacking an opposable thumb made it a tad difficult for her to find anything, and so she soon gave up with a growl that seemed to give off an air of disgust.

Before I could do anything, she tipped the backpack over and began rooting through my stuff.

"Hey!" I protested, half-reaching out to grab her before I remembered just how nasty those teeth of hers could be. "What's gotten into you? We need to find somewhere to hide for the night, in case you hadn't noticed!"

She let out a seemingly triumphant bark, and nudged my pokedex towards me.

I stared at the little red device for a moment, before I realized just what she had been driving at. "You're brilliant."

Just how she had thought of it and how it had managed to slip my mind, I didn't know, but she was incredibly smart for managing it, anyway. All pokedexes had built-in GPS units, and could show your approximate location on a satellite map of wherever you happened to be, provided that there was reception. While the GPS was only accurate to within a ten-meter radius or so, it was still better than how we'd been blundering through the forest.

Biting my lip and hoping that we hadn't somehow strayed into unmapped terrain or moved beyond the reception zones, I switched on the pokedex, and watched its tiny little screen come to life. It didn't take any longer than a minute for me to bring up the mapping function, and soon enough, I saw a blinking red spot on the screen – we were on a map!

"Alright, Courtney, we're going to keep moving according to the map, you got that?" I asked her, causing her to bob her head enthusiastically. "I'll watch the map, and you keep an eye out for anything... that may be out to get us, okay?"

All it took was a few seconds for me to magnify the map's image on the screen, but when the map finally turned up, I felt my excitement die a little. We were skirting the edge of unmapped terrain, and according to the pokedex, we were probably a good ten kilometres away from Eterna city. Given that the forest terrain was significantly difficult to navigate since we were literally off the beaten path, covering that distance would obviously take much longer than half a day.

At least we had the pokedex's compass as our guide – it indicated our direction of travel on the map, which was probably the biggest bit of help it could offer to us.

"Be vigilant, girl," I said, swallowing my apprehension. "It looks like we won't be able to make it out tonight, so we'll need to hole up somewhere in the forest or risk being eaten."

Courtney let out an apprehensive-sounding rumble, and we continued our trek through the increasingly darkened forest.

xxx

After what felt like an eternity of trekking through some rather dense undergrowth, we finally reached a large cluster of mossy rocks. No plants were growing around them, and the leafy canopy overhead rendered the area almost entirely dark due to the time of day. As I got closer to them, I saw that there was an opening of sorts between the rocks. Upon closer observation, the rocks themselves seemed to form a sort of large enclosure, since they were all apparently placed around a depression in the ground.

Somehow, I felt that I was being watched. A quick and discreet glance at my surroundings revealed nothing out of the ordinary, not even the tell-tale zigzag of a kecleon's belly. The trees around the rock cluster were oddly quiet, without any pokemon in their branches that I could see.

Trying to ignore the sense of foreboding that was building up in my gut, I decided to sweep the area with my pokedex – its sensory array might have been rudimentary at best, but reasonably large pokemon could be detected at range. Several seconds later, the device beeped and its screen flashed an NPD – short for 'No Pokemon Detected' - message. So it seemed the trees were free of any pokemon, at least if the sensors were accurate.

I narrowed my eyes at the large mass of rocks. Maybe there was a pokemon hiding among them? Or were they just a heap of stones that had been placed there by some clefairy? Cautiously, I got closer to them, and took a look between them. There were no signs of ambush predators such as geodude and shuckle that I could see, and the ground in the center of the cluster seemed a bit too moist for the likes of them, anyway.

The only thing that bothered me somewhat was the fact that the rocks were somehow not touched by the twigs and other leafy debris that liberally covered the ground around them. It was almost as if the rocks had some sort of repulsion towards falling leaves, really.

"Looks like we'll be able to hold up here for the night, girl," I said, pocketing my pokedex and turning around to face my gible. However, she was doing something rather unexpected. "What's the matter, girl?"

Courtney was backing away, and growling softly at me. Her expression seemed to suggest a mixture of fear and aggression, though I honestly couldn't read her that well yet. She eventually stopped backing away, and began hopping up and down on the spot, waving her stubby little paws around frantically.

"What's the problem, Courtney?" I asked her, placing my hands on my hips. "Look, if we don't find shelter, we might get eaten by something tonight. Do you seriously want to end up dead or something?"

She shook her head, and jabbed a paw in my direction, making a frantic-sounding hissing noise.

Just as she did that, a twig snapped behind me. Reflexively, I dropped to the ground, feeling something solid passing above my back as I did so. I rolled over, and saw that somehow, the rocks themselves were all moving. The thing that I had felt cutting through the air was a large, pincer-like appendage attached to the rock closest to me, which had two beady eyes glancing out at me from near its base.

"Fuck!" I started scrambling backwards, even as the rocks slowly began lifting themselves off the ground and making their way towards me. "Courtney, stay back!"

Some distant part of my memory matched a name to the creatures even as I hurriedly got back to my feet and ran towards my pokemon. What I had mistaken for a pile of rocks had actually been a group of crustle – highly adapted insect pokemon that used camouflage to ambush their prey. Fortunately, they were rather slow, and so I had managed to evade their first moves.

I picked Courtney up, not bothering to recall her, and ran away from the murderous bug pokemon, trying to make it to a part of the forest where the trees grew thicker. While crustle were slow, they were also known to be determined hunters.

Before I could make it past the tree-line, a horrible bout of screeching started, and several black blurs swooped over my head, nearly bowling me over. As I made it between some large trees, I risked a backwards glance, and saw that the crustle were now trying to beat back the murder of murkrow that had decided to attack them. The dark-type birds played a game of hit and run, trying to attack the crustles' eyes as the rock-like bugs began digging into the ground in an attempt to defend their only weak point.

It was quite a breathtaking sight, in a violent and tense kind of way. The murkrow were all clearly intelligent enough to recognize that a crustle could only be harmed when it had its head out of the ground, and so they had probably waited around until someone like me came along before attacking. For their part, the crustle had dug in with their legs, and were taking random swipes at their assailants, blinded by the vertical blind spot created by their own heavy shells.

Courtney sank her teeth into my forearm, startling me out of my reverie. Shaking my head to clear my thoughts, I started running again, ignoring the rivulets of blood running down my arm.

xxx

"Thanks for saving my life, Courtney," I said, as I scratched her behind her fin. I had managed to bandage my arm with some of my limited first aid supplies, and so patting her felt a little awkward. "On a related note, I'm now symmetrical – both my arms are in bandages."

Courtney let out what sounded like an amused snort, and rubbed her snout against the hand which she had bitten just yesterday. Two days, and she had already managed to injure both of my arms – we just got along so awesomely, it seemed.

She snuggled up to me, and closed her eyes, hissing softly. Her scales, while rough, did have a rather comfortable feel to them as they rubbed against the un-bandaged parts of my arms. It didn't take long for her to fall asleep, and so I just sat there on our branch, holding her in my arms and leaning back against the tree's trunk.

After the near-death incident with the crustle, we had done some serious running – specifically speaking, I did the running while carrying her – and came across a tree that seemed easy enough to climb, with no wild pokemon in sight. So I had climbed the tree, and settled us down in its branches. Initially, I nearly had a heart attack when I found what resembled a kakuna's shed pupa on a branch, but it turned out to be a rather dry leaf instead.

Securing myself to the branch with my belt around my left arm, and using my backpack to do the same for Courtney, I closed my eyes and slowly slipped into a restless sleep.

It didn't take long for me to get woken up by the unmistakable sound of twigs and leaves crunching underfoot, though.

I opened my eyes in an instant, trying to spot the pokemon before it could spot me. The two of us were fairly high up, but twenty feet probably wasn't much to the likes of breloom or shiftry. So I waited there silently, glancing around in the darkness as the unknown pokemon came closer in the darkness.

Soon enough, two glowing yellow eyes became visible in the darkness around the tree we were in. They seemed to be somewhat reptilian in nature, though I really couldn't tell at that distance. The eyes came closer and closer, until they were almost directly beneath us. Some hissing noises came from the base of the tree, followed by several rasping breaths as the pokemon tried to sniff out its quarry.

All I could do was to hold my breath – Courtney was probably safe, since her breathing was much slower and quieter – and pray to whatever gods were listening that the sceptile's eyesight wasn't good enough for it to see through twenty feet of darkness. Hell, I didn't even know for sure if it was a sceptile; it was all guesswork thanks to the darkness, really.

My unknown stalker suddenly stopped sniffing about, and went completely silent. I squinted in its general direction, trying to see just what it was doing or what it had sensed, but to no avail. The pokemon seemed to stand still for what felt like hours, before finally turning tail and fleeing into the dark forest as fast as its legs could carry it. For a while, I just sat there, waiting to see if it would come back of if some other pokemon would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Fortunately, neither of the two happened.

It took me a few moments to gather my wits, and I started to undo the belt that held me down on the branch. I quietly shook Courtney until she was awake, and released her from the backpack's straps. She let out a questioning growl, but shut up as soon as she realized that it was still completely dark.

At least, I hope that was how she was thinking of the situation at hand. For all I knew, she could have been plotting to kill me right there and then.

I leaned over and whispered into what I guessed were her ears, "Something knew we were here - maybe a sceptile. Should we find a new tree?"

Her answer, a nervous-sounding hiss, was clear enough despite the language barrier.

"Alright, then. Sleep in shifts?"

She nuzzled my arm, and let out a soft growl. I patted her on her back, and began keeping vigil. She didn't seem to be nodding off even after quite some time, though, and I got the impression that she was just as worried about the predatory pokemon coming back for us as I was.

It was going to be a long night.

xxx

Just as I was beginning to doze off, as the first rays of dawn began shining down through the treetops, a distant yet earth-shaking roar echoed through the forest. Courtney woke up with a start, nearly falling off the branch we were on. I barely managed to catch her, and almost fell out of the tree myself, when a second roar was heard.

"Holy shit! We need to get out of here!" I hissed at Courtney, as I frantically stuffed her into my backpack – she barely fit in past her ankles. "I'd take my chances running."

She growled, and hopped out of the backpack, shaking her head before jumping off the branch and landing on the ground. All I could do was gawk at her.

"You are one crazy bitch."

My gible rolled her eyes and gestured for me to get down from my perch, and so I scrambled down the tree trunk, wincing slightly as my bandages got torn off by the rough bark. Once I hit the ground, I whipped out my pokedex, and activated its mapping function. The little red diode at the side of the pokedex glowed brightly as it accessed the network that provided it with terrain information, and when the screen finally lit up with our approximate position, I felt my emotions soar a little.

"Alright, Courtney, we just need to head that way!" I pointed in the direction indicated by the pokedex. "Just eight more kilometres to Eterna city!"

Somehow, when we had fled from those Crustle, we had maintained our heading towards Eterna city, it seemed. Grabbing her pokeball and recalling her, I started running according to my pokedex's directions. Everything turned into a blur of trees, rocks, and uneven ground as I ran through the forest, desperate to make it to Eterna city.

Eight clicks might have been a little beyond my usual running distance, but really, I could have easily run myself into unconsciousness if I wanted to. Just as I vaulted over a fallen tree trunk, a sceptile burst out of the undergrowth and ran past me, so distracted by whatever it was up to that it didn't even notice me.

"Fuck!" I all but screeched, stopping so suddenly that I fell backwards. There was a dull, throbbing pain in my back not three seconds after that, thanks to the rotting log that I had jumped over.

Before I could get up, the sceptile was back. The leaf-like frills on its upper limbs were all unfolded, and its slit-like pupils were wide open, dilated with the thrill of the hunt. Its spiny tail thrashed against the ground like a bullwhip, gouging out soil and sending it into the air.

However, it charged past me, and ran head-first into the arbok that crashed through the undergrowth it had emerged out of. With a blindingly fast crack of its sinuous tail, the sceptile was sent flying through the air, and hit a tree trunk with a sickening cracking noise.

"Stay back!" I yelled at the arbok as it reared up not ten feet away from me, expanding its hood and revealing the massive, face-like pattern that was the signature coloration for its species. "Stay the fuck back!"

I dug a hand into one of my pants' pockets, and found my knife. A practiced flick of my wrist snapped its blade into position, causing the arbok to narrow its beady eyes at me and arch its head back a little. The two of us were so fixated on each other that both of us were caught by surprise when the wounded sceptile pounced on the arbok from the side, slashing at its open hood with sharp claws that left deep, bleeding scratches in the snake's purple body.

Faster than thought, the massive purple snake opened its jaws wide and bit down on the sceptile's shoulder before the leafy lizard could do anything, causing the wounded pokemon to let out a shrill cry of agony. Dark purple venom oozed out of the bite wound as the arbok released its prey, and pulled back, coiling its muscular body into the distinctive 'S' shape that it was known to use before striking. The arbok's excessive venom dripped out of the messy bite wounds on the sceptile's shoulder, causing the undergrowth to blacken and sizzle where it fell to the ground.

Paralyzed by fear, I could only watch as the sceptile collapsed to the ground in a convulsing heap. Within the blink of an eye, the arbok struck again, this time biting down on the sceptile's neck and wrapping its powerful coils around the doomed grass-type like a living whip. The snake's coils tightened around the poisoned sceptile, slowly forcing its body into a grotesquely unnatural position, until the wet sound of snapping bones was heard.

When the arbok finally relaxed its grip on the sceptile's broken carcass and started eating it, head first, my mind at long last reengaged itself, screaming at me to get the hell out of there. I gladly obliged, picking myself up off the ground and running away from the feeding arbok, still unsteady on my legs as the sceptile's dying cry echoed in my ears.

It seemed to take forever, but I finally made it to the stream that was the milestone of sorts for Eterna city. According to my pokedex, the stream was somewhere about four kilometres from the city's boundaries, and the terrain beyond the stream was earmarked as being the territory of pokemon rangers. So if the map was correct, then the forest up ahead was pretty much tame compared to that which I had just left behind. Hell, the stream itself was a bright spot in the relative darkness of the forest, since not many trees grew over the water. Some sunlight from the early morning lit the stream's banks up rather nicely, and I just stood there for a bit, enjoying the early morning atmosphere. The fact that I didn't have any possibly murderous pokemon on my trail was also a bonus.

On hindsight, Eterna forest's reputation and difficulty rating probably wasn't much to go by, given that the rate of trainer disappearances in Eterna forest was still among the higher ones in Sinnoh, at least for its danger level. Places like Pastoria's Great Marsh and Snowpoint's mountain slopes were obviously much more dangerous, but Eterna forest still held a respectable position among the 'lower levelled' travelling routes.

With a sigh of relief, I cast a wary glance at my surroundings, and made sure that there were no pokemon in sight. I released Courtney, and sat down by the stream's bank as she materialized out of her pokeball. When she had rematerialized and regained her bearings, she got one good look at me, and tackled me with a screech.

"What the-" was all I could get out before she proceeded to paw at my arms – both of them had lost their bandage wrappings sometime during the course of my pell-mell running. "Whoa, take it easy, Courtney!"

She stepped back, and shook her head, stomping on the ground out of frustration. Stubby paws gestured at my arms, and squinty eyes got the message across.

"Alright, alright," I rolled my eyes. "Jeez, you're like my mother or something. I'm sorry, alright?"

Courtney seemed to glare at me for a moment, before stepping up to me and clouting me upside the shoulder. She then jabbed a paw downwards, as if to point at the ground. With that, she spun about, and started walking back towards the tree-line.

"Hey, where are you going?" I asked her, jumping to my feet and going after her. "It's dangerous in there!"

With a growl, she turned around, and began pushing at my knees. When that didn't work, she began jabbing her paw at the ground again, similar to the gesture that she had made earlier.

"Look, I have no idea how you expect me to understand that, so I'm going with you," I said, shaking my head. "You could get hurt in there!"

She growled, sounding exasperated, and gestured towards the undergrowth ahead of us. I squinted to try and see whatever it was she was pointing at, but to no avail.

"What are you trying to say, Courtney?" I asked her, as she made her way towards the little plants and started to tear them up by the roots. "And what did those plants ever do to you?"

With a nod of sorts, she pointed at the plants – little white flowers that somehow looked familiar fell to the ground as she shook the uprooted specimens - with one paw, and waved in my direction.

"... Whatever works for you, girl."

We headed back to the stream, and she walked along the water's edge until she found a shallow, clear part of the stream. She then began washing the plants in the water, and proceeded to chew on them once they had been cleaned of all dirt and soil.

I watched, fascinated, as she chewed on the shoots. She was clearly up to something, and had even sought out those particular plants. They looked quite similar to all the other plants that made up the undergrowth in Eterna forest, although the leaves did bring back some memories from the Survival Basics component of my schooling curriculum, when I thought about it.

"Are those herbs of some sort?" I asked her. "They look kind of familiar."

She nodded, and came up to me, spitting the masticated shoots out onto her paw and offering it to me. I hesitantly used a finger to scoop up some of the mashed plant matter, and sniffed it. When I smelled something similar to chrysanthemums, I immediately remembered the name of the plant.

"Is this arrowroot, Courtney?" I nudged her, even as I dabbed at my injuries with the paste. "It certainly smells like arrowroot."

With an enthusiastic nod, she proceeded to jump up and slap some of the mashed shoots on my other arm. Then, she picked up the roots that she had initially set aside, and started to chew on them.

For a moment, I hesitated while smearing the plant paste on my wounds. Courtney certainly seemed to know a great deal of things that pokemon normally wouldn't have known. First she had reminded me that my pokedex had a GPS mapping function, and now she was using arrowroot to help me treat my wounds. How she knew that my pokedex was capable of mapping out terrain and where she had picked up the little herb's common name were most puzzling, indeed.

"Courtney," I called out to her, causing her to pause in her chewing of the herb's roots, "how did you know that my pokedex had a map in it?"

She gave me a blank look, and waved one of her paws at me, followed by a series of light taps on the side of her head.

"Right... and the arrowroot's name? I doubt that you pokemon know it by that name."

A series of amused hissing noises was all I got in response, as she seemed to try shrugging, and shaking her head.

I frowned. "I'm so going to need a psychic, or maybe a translator of some sort. Otherwise, you could be plotting my timely demise and I'd be clueless."

Finished with her arrowroot, she merely burped and waved a paw at me while turning about to get a drink out of the stream.

Just as I was about to say something to her, a teenage girl walked out of the forest ahead of us, on the other side of the stream. She was dressed all in black, oddly enough, and had brown hair that was tied back in a ponytail. A pair of narrow-framed spectacles gave her a rather nerdy appearance, and her body wasn't exactly that of a swimsuit model. After several moments, a parasect slowly made its way to the stream's bank, yellow eyes glowing faintly from beneath its humped, mushroom-like shell as it settled down next to her.

"You there!" she seemed happy for some reason when she saw me. "Is the gible yours?"

Courtney and I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Was she a pokemon thief? Or was she just looking for a fight? Either option meant something bad for the two of us at that point in time, really.

On second thought, though, she didn't look that bad.

"I challenge you to a pokemon battle!"

Well, shit!


End file.
